On a Saturday afternoon in the early 1980s, the mall is busy from end to end. The movie theater is open. The music store near the entrance has a crowd. The restaurants are serving a steady stream of customers.
People are browsing the shelves in the bookstore. You can buy shoes, clothes, snacks, or a movie ticket without ever stepping outside. The mall stood along the U.S. 68 corridor near Springfield, Ohio.
It was an enclosed shopping center, built on the edge of the city for the car-travel era. Department stores anchored the ends of the building, and chain stores filled the space between them.
From the time it opened, Upper Valley Mall became Springfield's main shopping center. It drew customers from across Clark County and kept that role into the 2000s. Other shopping options existed, but nothing else in the area matched the range of stores and services it offered.
Upper Valley Mall's Grand Opening Day
Upper Valley Mall opened on August 2, 1971, at 1475 Upper Valley Pike. Its tenant list showed from the start that this was meant to be a major shopping center.
The five anchor stores were J.C. Penney, Sears, Rike's, Wren's, and Woolworth's.
Dozens of smaller tenants filled the rest of the building, including Cinema I & II, Camelot Music, Carousel Snack Bar, Cassano Pizza King, Chess King, Foxmoor Casuals, Hot Sam Pretzels, Jaccard Jewelers, Jo-Ann Fabrics, Kinney Shoes, Lambert Bakery, Merle Norman Cosmetics, Spencer Gifts, and Walden Books.
Wren's had operated in downtown Springfield before opening an anchor store in the new mall.
That move was part of a broader change in local retail over the following years, as longtime downtown department stores became part of larger chains and more shopping moved out to the Upper Valley Pike corridor.
The Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation chose the site to draw shoppers from across Clark County, not only from the nearby neighborhoods.
The Backbone of an Entire County's Retail
Elder-Beerman became an anchor store in the years after the mall opened. That addition helped keep Upper Valley Mall at the center of retail in Clark County for many years.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the mix of stores changed as national chains opened and closed.
Even so, the building stayed largely occupied because Springfield still needed a major shopping destination, and no other place in the area matched its size.
In 2008, the mall's occupancy rate was 90 percent. In 2009, it was 91 percent. Those were solid numbers for a regional mall of that size.
Simon Property Group owned the mall through much of that period. Around that time, the building measured about 744,000 square feet and still played a major role in the county's economy.
The 2008 and 2009 numbers looked strong. But problems were already building. The economic downturn that began in 2008 hurt retail. Online shopping was growing.
Traditional anchor department stores were losing strength. Those pressures were already affecting the mall before any anchor had announced plans to leave.
Forty-Eight Million Dollars in Trouble
Between 2011 and 2013, occupancy at Upper Valley dropped from 80 percent to 65 percent - more than 25 percentage points below the 2009 high.
On June 27, 2014, Wells Fargo filed a complaint to take control of the property over about $48 million in debt. By the end of July, a Chicago-based firm called Urban Retail Properties had taken over management.
Elder-Beerman's Springfield location had already closed in 2013. In January 2015, Macy's set a closing date for its Upper Valley location, and JCPenney followed with the same decision at nearly the same moment.
The Macy's closure alone cut 79 jobs. By 2017, the mall had also lost American Eagle, Christopher & Banks, Rue21, Deb Shops, Vanity, and Kay Jewelers.
What remained was CVS, Claire's, Hot Topic, and a handful of others.
The distressed-property auction in late 2015 drew a winning bid of $2.65 million - above the $1.5 million minimum, but far below the roughly $20 million estimated value from just three years earlier.
The Cinema and the Last Anchor Standing
Cinema I & II, which had been running at the mall since opening day and under Chakeres Theatres in its later years, went dark on February 20, 2017, after nearly five decades.
Of all the original tenants from 1971, a two-screen movie theater was perhaps the least likely to outlast the department stores.
When it closed, the last major entertainment draw the mall had was gone.
By early 2017, more than half of the mall's storefronts were sitting empty. Sears was the only department-store anchor left, holding the building together at its far end while the interior hollowed out around it.
The parking lot that had once served thousands of weekend shoppers sat mostly empty on weekday afternoons.
Sears closed its Springfield location in March 2019. No department-store anchors remained.
The building was still standing and still occasionally used, but the stores that had justified its existence and driven its foot traffic were gone, and no replacement was coming.
Sports Courts, Vaccines, and Plans That Stopped
In 2017, one proposal called for a youth sports complex at the Upper Valley site costing about $44 million.
The plan centered on an indoor building of about 95,000 square feet with basketball and volleyball courts.
Two years later, another proposal linked to Home Plate Sports Academy laid out a larger project with retail, restaurants, hotel space, and entertainment. Neither plan moved forward.
In late 2020, Clark County approved the temporary use of the former JCPenney space for COVID-19 vaccination and testing.
By 2021, the last vaccination clinic at the site had already taken place.
A space that had opened in 1971 as a busy anchor department store was now being used for public health work because the building was large, vacant, and available.
By that point, most people in Springfield no longer spoke of it as a mall. County officials and developers no longer treated it as one, either.
The issue was no longer whether to bring the mall back. The issue was what would replace it.
Bought Out, Sold, and Permanently Closed
Clark County's land bank started acquiring pieces of the property before the final closure. In December 2016, it bought the vacant Macy's building for about $250,000.
In May 2018, it purchased roughly 40 acres of the mall site for about $3 million, taking on a $3 million loan to do so - the biggest change in the land bank's finances that year.
On April 15, 2021, Clark County set June 16 as the permanent closure date for Upper Valley Mall. Thirteen tenants were still operating when the notice went out.
A week before the shutdown, the county finalized a deal to sell the 76.8-acre site to Industrial Commercial Properties, or ICP, for $2.25 million, with ICP planning to convert it into a business park.
The doors closed on June 16, 2021, about 50 years after they first opened.
After the closure was finalized, Clark County arranged for pieces of the mall - including the Peanuts-themed Christmas displays that had been part of the building for decades - to be donated to the Heritage Center for preservation.
An Industrial Park Still Under Construction
The first two leases at Upper Valley Business Park were signed on March 31, 2022. Eby-Brown took 35,000 square feet, and Rittal Inc. committed to 130,000 square feet.
ICP had converted the former mall into a property for office tenants and light industrial companies.
By October 2022, workers had torn down the old cinema, repainted the exterior, and cut loading docks into the building for one of the new tenants.
In October 2023, Square & Circle Hygienes moved in as the first manufacturing company on the site. The building had been fully renovated inside and out by that point and measured close to 600,000 square feet.
In December 2025, a permit went out for a new monument sign at 1487 Upper Valley Pike - an address used for part of the redeveloped property - and more than two-thirds of the building remained unleased.
As of March 2026, 406,500 square feet remained available across eight separate spaces. A second phase of renovation is still in progress.
Upper Valley Mall
Former shopping mall in Springfield, OH
Address: 1475 Upper Valley Pike, Springfield, OH 45504
Opened: August 2, 1971
Closed: 2021
Developer: Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation
Owner: Clark County Land Reutilization Corp.
Floor area: 742,704 square feet
